I have been a longtime user of Trello and I recommend Trello to both individuals and teams to help them get more done. It's a fantastic tool for managing projects and really organizing almost anything.
And it's very interesting to see how Trello has affected many other applications, particularly in the productivity space. Microsoft, about a year and a half ago, introduced something called Boards, which allows you to manage your Microsoft files and other Microsoft documents within a sort of Trello-like space.
Then roughly a year ago, Asana, which has been around for a while as a very excellent task and project management tool, introduced a Boards version of their application as well.
So today, I wanted to take a look at the Asana software. I want to look at the Asana application both from the vantage point of a Trello user and also for those who are just looking for an alternative or maybe looking for a new tool to manage either your personal tasks and your personal to-dos or if you're wanting to collaborate with others.
Let's start out. This is sort of the traditional or default view here in Asana. I'm looking at one of my projects that I've titled Personal To-Do List, and here you can see all of my tasks listed below.
Now, Asana really was developed from a task management point of view, and you can see that these check marks here are built right into the application. It's really meant to complete things, not just manage things or not just organize things, which many of us might do within a Trello board.
You can also separate your tasks by adding these sections. So here you see I've very originally titled them New Section, Section Two, and Section Three. So you can sort of break up your tasks. However, it should be noted that if you go to move your sections, it does not bring the tasks below them with them. I found this kind of surprising that the sections weren't grouping together the tasks that are below them.
So there might be some other interesting ways in how you can break up your sections and how people are using sections within Asana, but I found that a little puzzling at first when I went to go and move around my sections.
In terms of the tasks themselves, you know, very similar to a drag-and-drop system. So you can reorder them or group them any way you like. One other thing I'll note is that it's very easy to add tasks to Asana just simply hitting Enter here.
If I want to add a new task, New Task For, and hit Enter, it gets me all set up for a new task. However, I soon realize that as soon as you hit Enter, not only does it get you ready for the new task, it actually creates that new task.
So here you see I haven't entered in any text or any title for this task, but it has actually gone ahead and created it. In fact, if I just hit Enter a few times, I'm going to have multiple tasks appear at the bottom of my list.
I found myself coming back and deleting a bunch of these tasks because of the way it's set up, because of the way that it adds an additional task with the Enter key, so I wasn't a big fan of that.
Let's move over here to the right-hand side of the screen, and you can see by selecting any of your tasks, it will give you a split-screen view. So you can still see all of your tasks on the left-hand side, but now we get to see the guts or the details of a particular task.
And for Trello users, a lot of this looks very familiar. We can assign a task to either ourselves or someone else, we can give it a due date, we can give it a like—you can almost think of this as a thumbs-up or maybe a voting button.
You can favorite tasks within Asana. You can have the ability to have subtasks, which is a really nice feature here within the Asana application. You can attach documents and other files and some other functionality such as copying and merging tasks, that type of thing.
Now, another thing to note is that you also have the ability to have a task appear in multiple projects. Right? You may have a single task which will benefit or is applicable to multiple projects. So you can see here this particular task exists in both my Personal To-Do List project but also in my New Website Development project.
So they can exist in multiple places. And then down below we've got some of the regular stuff—the title, the description. Here you can see I have an attachment as a part of this task, and you can see the image here as well. And at the very bottom, you have a comment section where you can have a discussion with other members who may have access to this project.
Now, I will admit this detailed view of the task did leave me feeling a little cramped. You don't have the option of just seeing the detailed view without your list. It's always going to show it in this split-screen view, and so I found that this did get me feeling just a little cramped with everything sort of bunched in here.
Again, coming from Trello, I'm used to having a larger card or a larger detailed area for me to work in.
Now, a few other things I want to show you here within your project: you have a few different views you can look at. You can view your conversation so you can see a nice summary of all the conversations that are going on within this project. It's a very nice touch.
We have a calendar, which is pretty basic. You can see where tasks are due on the calendar view. You also have a progress view where you can give this project a status update using sort of the traffic light system, but you can also see a graphical representation of the number of tasks you have remaining to do here in blue and the number of tasks which you have completed.
So that's sort of just a nice visual indicator of where you're going with your tasks. And then lastly, you can view all of the files which are attached to this project.
So again, nice to have some of these summary views such as the conversations and the files—really easy to get to, really easy to access so you can view these other areas of the project.
Another nice thing with Asana is that you can access your other projects quite quickly and with ease. You can minimize or hide this left-hand menu if you like, but it's really quite quick, you know, transferring between different projects that you have here.
Another nice thing that I really like about Asana is that this My Tasks area will give you a summary of all the tasks that you are assigned to. So regardless of the project where that task lives, you can see all of those tasks here and do the same type of functionality. You can make changes to the tasks here.
But I like how it gives you a nice summary of everything that has been assigned to you regardless of how many projects you're involved with.
So I started off by talking about Boards and how Asana introduced Boards. So let's take a look at what Boards look like in Asana.
Now, probably the most important thing to note is that if you are desiring a board view in Asana, you have to make that decision from the get-go. You have to make that decision when you first create the project.
So here, I've created a project. I've titled it Content Planning and I've even put in parentheses Board Style to remind myself that this was the board project because the first two I showed you are using the traditional Asana list view. You cannot view these projects in a board style, just like I cannot view this board-style project in a list view.
And again, I found that a little bit surprising. I assume that the column headers, or what we refer to as lists in Trello, would be the equivalent of sections in our list view, but that is not the case. You do have to make that choice; you have to make that distinction when you first create the board.
So here is the board view, or the board style in Asana. Again, if you've used Trello in the past, you'll find this looks very familiar. We have what Asana calls columns here—the vertical columns—you can have as many as you like, and then we have our cards or probably more appropriately called tasks within those columns.
Because if you click on any of these tasks, we have all the same functionality, identical functionality as you would find in the list view version of Asana. Again, it looks a little more comfortable to me here that we have a larger display, a larger view of the details of that task, but everything here is exactly the same as we would find in the list view.
So, some other thoughts about Asana. I'm going to go back to the list view here just for a second. Something that I found a little, I guess a little uncomfortable—not just how cramped some of the space was here in the list view, but just how much white and gray text on top of white is displayed.
I found that there wasn't quite enough distinction as I would prefer when working with an application. We got an awful lot of white space and then most of the text is in this gray color. You know, I find that Trello does a very good job of making a distinction between some buttons and bolded text and highlighted areas, and that was something that made me a little, not uncomfortable, but just made it maybe look that much harder as to where do I need to go to make this change or find this piece of information.
So maybe too much white and not enough distinction for my own personal taste.
One other thing that really stood out to me is that here we see the activity log for what has been done or what has been changed on this Asana task, and it gives you the ability to delete the log.
Now, you do it one by one. The first one you can't change when it was created, but I can go here and say, you know what? Yeah, I added it to that project, but you know, I don't want to. Let's just get rid of that. And so it's gone. And you can see here just a few moments ago, not too long ago, I added this to this particular project. I can say, well, get rid of that.
I don't know the advantage of allowing the user or users to do that. It'd be nice if maybe you could minimize this if you think this is taking up too much space, but it really surprised me that you can go and actually delete your activity log or the timestamp. I think you always want the ability to go back and see when something was changed.
So there you have it. Asana somewhat through the eyes of a Trello user or a Trello expert. Which one is better? It's going to come down to personal preference and what you are trying to accomplish, what you are trying to do.
I would love to hear your thoughts about Asana and also Trello. What do you use these applications for and which do you think shines brighter depending on the circumstance? What do you use these particular pieces of software for? If you like this video, I would encourage you to give me a thumbs up down below and be sure to leave a comment as well. I would love to hear your input and also hear what are some of the other pieces of software or other types of videos you would like to see here on the Simpletivity channel. And if you haven't already done so, please be sure to subscribe. We would love to have you as a part of the Simpletivity community. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult—in fact, it's very simple.
